U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff
The U.S. House of Representatives has wasted no time after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump on Tuesday. Yesterday, the House Intelligence Committee held a public hearing featuring Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire. The subject of the hearing, which was carried on virtually all of the cable TV news channels plus C-SPAN, was the just-released Whistleblower complaint against Trump, his attorney Rudolph Giuliani, U.S. Attorney General William Barr, and possibly others.
The Whistleblower complaint alleges that Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zolensky to investigate activities of Joe Biden and his son Hunter, in return for U.S. military aid to Ukraine, and then sought to hide the record of Trump’s phone call, as well as Trump’s calls with other foreign leaders, on a separate, secret electronic server. The complaint contains other related allegations as well, and, for some members of Congress, was apparently the last straw that influenced them to support the House formal impeachment inquiry. Just this week, the slowly building stream of House members supporting the impeachment inquiry became a waterfall, jumping by some 75 to reach 218, the majority number needed to vote to impeach Trump or other federal officials.
Yesterday’s hearing presented quite an official opening to the House impeachment inquiry. Several bombshells were revealed during the hearing, including:
–Not only did Maguire fail to forward the Whistleblower complaint to Congress within seven days as required by law, he instead consulted with the White House Counsel’s Office to find out if Trump wanted to hide the complaint behind “executive privilege,” even though Trump was the very subject of the complaint. Not surprisingly, he was told that Trump did want to hide the complaint. Likewise, Maguire then consulted with the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel for guidance on what he should do with the complaint, even though the head of the DOJ, Attorney General Barr, is also a subject of the complaint. Not surprisingly, Maguire said that the OLC told him he was not required to forward the complaint to Congress. As Committee Chairman Adam Schiff pointed out, this was a shocking conflict of interest, akin to the police asking criminal suspects whether to prosecute cases against them. It’s the classic example of the fox guarding the hen house, and now it can be alleged that Maguire himself, as a go-between, is knee-deep in the Trump cover-up.
–Maguire refused to state whether he spoke to Trump directly about the Whistleblower complaint. If that happened, the tremendous conflict of interest that already took place in sharing the complaint with the White House Counsel would have been compounded even further.
–The Justice Department, again headed by a subject of the Whistleblower complaint, Attorney General Barr, also instructed the FBI, which it oversees, not to investigate the allegations in the complaint. This again raises the glaring conflict of interest in giving officials the choice whether to investigate themselves. Likewise, based on the DOJ opinion that Maguire requested, the Inspector General of Maguire’s Office of National Intelligence says that he cannot investigate the incident either, because it involves the president. Maguire stated that he believes the decision is thus left to Congress whether to act on the Whistleblower complaint.
The fact that the House hearing was so widely broadcast was no accident. That is what happens when the words “formal impeachment” are attached to a Congressional investigation. Starting this week, therefore, the press and the public are likely to get a more focused education on Trump administration wrongdoings, and efforts to cover up those wrongdoings. And, as Maguire indicated, it is up to Congress whether to act on the Whistleblower complaint. Congress is now doing just that, and, under the Constitution, its principal remedy if it finds wrongdoing is impeachment.
Photo by Jessi Lintl, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/y9KmjK
